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Examples of beleaguer in a Sentence

the lack of funds that beleaguers schools

beleaguered the castle for months

Recent Examples of beleaguer from the Web

Far from the initial fighting was the Catholic church, a supposedly safe place for triage, and beleaguered and wounded students were arriving from the front lines by pickup truck, by motorbike, and on foot.

Where Howard Davies’s 1999 production revolved around Spacey, Wolfe’s production places Washington as one of three tentpole performances, between Colm Meaney’s beleaguered bar owner and David Morse’s haunting, haunted ex-revolutionary.

DeKalb County’s beleaguered ambulance provider has agreed to increase staff and coverage in areas where response times tend to be longer, though the new effort may do little to satisfy officials who’ve already given up on the company.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'beleaguer.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

English speakers created "beleaguer" from the Dutch word belegeren in the 16th century. "[Military men] will not vouchsafe . . . to use our ancient terms belonging to matters of war, but do call a camp by the Dutch name," commented the English soldier and diplomat Sir John Smyth in 1590. The word for "camp" that he was referring to is "leaguer." That term in turn comes from Dutch "leger," which is one of the building blocks of "belegeren" (literally, "to camp around"). But neither "leaguer" nor "beleaguer" were in fact utterly foreign. Old English "leger," the source of our modern "lair," is related to the Dutch word. And the Old English "be-" ("about, around"), as seen in "besiege" and "beset," is related to the Dutch prefix be- in "belegeren."

Origin and Etymology of beleaguer

Dutch belegeren, from be- (akin to Old English be-) + leger camp; akin to Old High German legar bed — more at lair